People Power: How Australian referendums are lost and won, by George Williams & David Hume; UNSW Press: Sydney, 2024, reviewed by Paul Norton, Brisbane.
The defeat of the proposal for a Constitutionally enshrined Indigenous Voice to Parliament has been the subject of several analyses of that specific referendum, including by the SEARCH Foundation. Now it is also addressed in a second edition of this generic study by Williams and Hume of referendums in Australia.
Williams and Hume begin with an explanation of the concept of a Federal referendum, followed by a review of the process for amending the Australian Constitution, including the necessity for a successful referendum to pass any such amendments. In among the weeds of constitutional details the authors briefly discuss some of the more novel arguments that have been put as to why amending the Constitution might be either easier, or harder, than is usually thought, before explaining why the conventional understanding is essentially correct.
The book then goes on to consider other forms of popular participation in making laws and policy in Australia. These include national plebiscites (for example, the conscription ‘referendums’ during World War I and the 2017 postal survey on marriage equality) and State and Territory referendums (which had a major, and greatly varying, influence on pub opening hours during the 20th century). The next chapter deals with referendum campaigns, including the ways in which governments have sought to regulate and resource such campaigns, the key actors and stakeholders in such campaigns, and the themes and tactics in Yes and No campaigns. Some variant of ‘If you don’t know, vote No’ recurs in referendum campaigns – and a version was utilised by the No campaign in Menzies’ 1950 referendum which attempted to ban the CPA.
Williams and Hume then outline the record of referendum results in Australia. Here we are reminded not only that unsuccessful referendums are more frequent than successful ones, but that they have become predominant over time. Indeed, the last successful Constitutional referendum was in 1977, a few months before I was old enough to vote!
The next chapter discusses eight referendum events and the reasons for their success or failure, followed by a chapter specifically analysing the Voice referendum of 2023 and the processes leading up to it. In the course of these chapters we are reminded more than once that campaigners for a Yes vote in Constitutional referendums face a major obstacle in the failure of the education system and the media (and, one could argue, political parties) to adequately inform the Australian public about the nature of our political system; surveys of voters conducted prior to some referendums have repeatedly shown considerable minorities of voters unaware that Australia even has a written constitution. The penultimate chapter discusses, in some detail, how this and other factors militate against the success of referendums.
The final chapter offers some suggestions for how to improve the success rate of Constitutional referendums. Worthwhile suggestions to increase public participation in the generation of referendum proposals and public awareness of and ownership of them However, as proposed, I think these steps would still mainly succeed in increasing involvement among those Australians who are already engaged to some degree in political processes. The problem of reaching out to the large number of unengaged citizens who genuinely don’t know, and therefore vote No, is not really addressed.
Williams and Hume also emphasise the need for bipartisan support in order for referendums to succeed. At one level they are obviously correct. Yet, for the socialist and radical left (including SEARCH) and even for the liberal centre, this is problematic. The persistently negative and reactionary role that the Coalition parties have played in relation to proposals for Constitutional reform over the past five decades hardly needs reciting and is unlikely to change given their current Trumpist turn. Do we really want them to hold a veto over any proposal for Constitutional reform? Also, even if a more constructive role were to be played by conservatives, acquiescing in the need for bipartisanship would narrow the scope of Constitutional reform as an option for progressives and socialists seeking more fundamental social changes.
Nonetheless this is an interesting and informative book. The referendum postmortems we read (and that some of us wrote) in 1988, 1999, and 2023 tended to be specific to the proposals and issues dealt with by those referendums. A volume such as this which provides a generic history and analysis of how referendums are (mostly) lost and (sometimes) won in Australia is a necessary complement and corrective.
